Previous Formative Experiences:
Schneiderman’s “Law Enforcement” Role As Deputy Sheriff Was
Teaching, Grant Writing And Administration
In Prosecution Of Early Financial Fraud Case As ADA, Dinallo
Discovered The Martin Act
Scattered Complaints Of Violations, Misconduct And Coercion In Rice’s Early Prosecution Record
S. 3000, Ed Muskie, And Richard Brodsky In-Between
Formative Experiences
Sean Coffey, Assistant U.S. Attorney
The first trial did not go well.
A man had been arrested with an 8-ball of cocaine at a post
office, and the agents thought they might have stumbled onto a drug ring of
mailmen dealing on the job. The case was assigned to Sean Coffey—young and
eager and new in the U.S. Attorney’s office, confident he could get the
conviction.
Coffey finished his opening statement. The judge turned to
Ellen Yaroshefsky, a Cardozo law professor who had taken up the defendant’s
cause.
She passed.
Over the next few days, Coffey laid out his case. Then
Yaroshefsky finally stood up: the only thing that mattered, she told the jury,
was that the man had been entrapped.
They could not convict him of possession—the whole thing had been a set-up.
After two days of deliberations, the verdict came back: one
count, not guilty; one count, 11-1 hung jury.
“It was a question of experience, and he didn’t have it, but
he was just lovely about it,” said Yaroshefsky, who described Coffey as
“conscientious, thoughtful, honorable—he was exactly what a prosecutor ought to
be.”
But still: it was his first trial as an assistant United
States attorney, and he had flubbed it.
So Coffey was a little surprised when James Comey—later the
Southern District U.S. Attorney himself, and after that, the deputy attorney
general who became famous for stopping Alberto Gonzalez from getting John
Ashcroft to sign off on continuing the domestic surveillance program from his
hospital bed—popped his head in to say congratulations.
“‘This means you’ll never be a member of the chicken shit
club,’” Coffey remembers Comey telling him, “‘those wimpy prosecutors who are
so concerned about their perfect record that they never try a hard case.’”
Coffey talks about his early experiences working as a
carpenter’s apprentice, building skyboxes at Madison Square Garden and swaying
in the wind as he hung sheetrock on the 102nd floor of the North
Tower of the World Trade Center as important eye-openers to the experiences of
other people, particularly his fellow workers, when in high school. And he
often references his time in the Navy, though in front of New York Democrats,
he usually leaves the part that had him serving as a military assistant to then-Vice
President George H.W. Bush. There was also a stop at Paul Weiss right after
passing the bar.
But the real shaping of his legal career, he said, was when
he started with U.S. Attorney, Southern District. Coffey had been looking
forward to joining the office since his days as a night student at Georgetown
Law (while his day job was at the Pentagon and the White House). The secret
service agents he got to know among his classmates used to go on about the
office’s reputation, he said, and that was where he decided he wanted to be.
Coffey got a conviction on his second trial, for a post
office robbery in the Bronx, going on to bring 13 cases to verdict over his
four years at St. Andrew’s Place.
He was purposefully building a reputation, he said, and one
that became part of a larger legal strategy for the rest of his career.
“I developed a very firm belief that if people believed that
you will take cases to trial, you will get better pleas,” Coffey said.
Working in the Narcotics Division, Coffey got convictions of
several cocaine dealers despite a criminal informant who turned out to be a
recovering heroin addict who unwittingly wore a wire with a transmission
problem. Purposefully, Coffey made sure he never knew the tapes were blank
until the defense was cross-examining him, building up his credibility as a
witness with the jury. He helped bring down the 48 Hours heroin ring in a
multiple-wiretap, two-year process that netted 50 arrests (including the
Columbia supplier), managing the DEA agents and pulling together the tapes and
the information to build the case, said Tom Finnegan, then also an AUSA working
with him on the case.
“At first, at the takedown, I thought we had a really weak
case against the guy, but it turned out, with Sean’s work, we were able to
build the case up really well,” Finnegan said.
At the end of his time in the office—he was already with
Bernstein Litowitz by the time the trial started—Coffey was assigned a case of three
North Carolina men arrested by the NYPD for gun trafficking. Thanks to an
offhand comment from one of them in an interview, Coffey was able to build an
investigation that demonstrated that the guns were being traded for a heap of
crack that one of the men had shoved down his pants and later dumped down the
toilet in the station, beyond the notice of the police. Without even a gram of
crack as evidence or any of the arresting officers realizing they had been
involved in a drug bust, Coffey got a three-way drug conviction.
“It was novel in the sense of: it’s pretty hard to prove
beyond a reasonable doubt that there were drugs when there were no drugs
found,” said Ira Feinberg, who handled the appeal for the U.S. Attorney’s
office—which challenged other aspects of the case, but not Coffey’s proof of
the drugs.
“It was a unique situation, one that I had not had before,”
said Robert Koppleman, one of the defense attorneys on the case, who remembers
Coffey as “a good lawyer. I thought he was a straight kind of guy—not like
everyone there at that time.”
Coffey was in the office from October 1991 through April
1995, and would have been there longer, if not for the financial pinch that
came once he and his wife started having children, after years of trying.
“It turned out the solution was to go on a government
salary,” he said. “I had just been at the office, and I got my first paycheck,
and I called Anne, and I said, ‘Honey I’ve got news for you: the paycheck here
is $100 less than half of my last Paul Weiss check.’ And she said, ‘I’ve got
news for you: it’s going to have to feed three people.’”
But the experiences stuck with him, pushing him to reexamine
evidence others might have missed and learning how to build business
investigations while in the office’s Major Crimes unit, which he says were
critical for when he launched his cases against companies like WorldCom in
private practice years later. So was that early lesson of pursuing trials and
building a reputation for being the kind of lawyer to who did.
Expect more of that mentality and delegating downward to top
recruits if he is elected attorney general, Coffey said.
“I’m going to try and take
more cases to trial,” Coffey said, “and hopefully these young kids coming out
of Paul Weiss, Skadden, who want to try cases in the public sector will be
throwing résumés to the OAG’s office, in addition to the Manhattan DA’s office
and the U.S. Attorney’s office.”
eidovere@cityhallnews.com
Read other formative experiences:
Schneiderman’s “Law Enforcement” Role As Deputy Sheriff Was
Teaching, Grant Writing And Administration
In Prosecution Of Early Financial Fraud Case As ADA, Dinallo
Discovered The Martin Act
Scattered Complaints Of Violations, Misconduct And Coercion In Rice’s Early Prosecution Record
S. 3000, Ed Muskie, And Richard Brodsky In-Between